Nagorno-Karabakh War

The Nagorno-Karabakh War (20 February 1988-12 May 1994) was a war fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in the Caucasus. The war broke out on 20 February 1988, when the Nagorno-Karabakh parliament voted to unify with the Azerbaijan SSR; the predominantly-Armenian region resisted the annexation of their region by the Shia Muslim Azeris, and they received the assistance of the Armenian SSR and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation against the Azerbaijanis and the Soviet Army. In the early years of the war, Azeris were expelled from Armenia while Armenians were expelled from Azerbaijan; throughout 1990, 90 Armenian civilians were killed and 700 injured in a pogrom in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. The Soviet Transcaucasian Military District cracked down on the nationalist Azerbaijani Popular Front Party in January 1990 with the assistance of the Azerbaijani government, temporarily putting an end to the violence. In the winter of 1992, after the dissolution of the USSR, violence broke out once more as the Armenian majority of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to secede from Azerbaijan and form the independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR), and 12,000 NKR and 8,000 Armenian troops fought against 64,000 Azerbaijani troops. The Azerbaijani forces included 350 Turkish Land Forces officers, 200 Grey Wolves, 3,000 Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin foreign fighters from Afghanistan, and 300 militants from Chechnya, all of whom sought to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan against Christian Armenia. In 1993, Armenia not only liberated Nagorno-Karabakh, but also regions beyond the province, advancing into Azerbaijan in 1994. Russia negotiated a peace agreement between the two countries at Bishkek in Tajikistan, with the Nagorno-Karabakh maintaining de facto independence and Armenian forces remaining in control of 9% of Azerbaijan outside of Nagorno-Karabakh. As many as 230,000 Armenians and 800,000 Azeris were displaced as a result of the bordered conflict, which has continued in the form of a Turkish blockade of Armenia and skirmishes between Armenia and Azerbaijan.